A Natural History Of Love (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
(from Semper Augustus)Having previously read Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses, comprised of wit and beautiful prose, anecdotes from both nature and history, insightful depth into the nature of our five senses, and scientific fact, I expected a lot from A Natural History of Love. And to be sure, the first 130 pages were interesting.Ackerman moves through history and literature to describe the many ways we have conceived of love. Beginning in Egypt, she describes the role that imagination played in both one's conception of love and reality, particularly in art. She writes:The Egyptians believed that to imagine something was to make it real. If one carved a statue of a donkey and placed it in a tomb, it would come to live to serve the deceased in the other world. Art was powerful. It could transform matter, bend time, escape death. It had a magical purpose. Most of the art we associate with Egypt was, in effect, a kind of fetishism. Beautiful art was practical art. But, by practical, they meant clay becoming flesh, paint becoming sheaves of wheat, a gemstone eye awakening the protection of a deity.She chronicles gender politics and the generally love-less marriage in Greece, especially the way in which treatment differed between married women, who were kept protected and isolated in the home, and streetwalkers, who experienced more freedom. She mentions the survival of one of the streetwalker's sandals and that "on its sole, studded so that it would brand the dust with each step, is the invitation, Follow me."Marking a significant shift in the way we understand love (but not necessarily marriage), she continues into the Middle Ages, which:introduced the image of the lovers, a society of two, as something noble and valuable. They honored pairs who felt passionate love for each other. Until then, love between men and women was thought to be sinful and vulgar. As often as not, it led to madness. And it was always degrading. To portray love as majestic, an ideal to be searched for, was truly shocking. To accept that sexual desire might be a natural part of love, but that the total feeling was more spiritual, an intense one-ness, didn't jibe with classical teachings. After all, in Greek tragedy, love was an affliction, a horror that led to cruelty and death. For theologians, human love was a poor reflection of the real thing, which could be found only in spiritual rapture.However, using the example of Abelard and Heloise, she writes that while our conception of love may have evolved during this time, our ideas about marriage had not. With the emergence of crusades, tournaments for knights, and chivalry, courtly love flourished. Romanticized for their risks and secrecy, these relationships usually occurred between knights and married women. Adulterous relationships were so prevalent that we find evidence of their reach even in the letters of Abelard and Heloise. Ackerman writes that:Both had believed deeply in love, courtly love- kept concealed, outside of marriage, full of quests and tests, a secret society. That is why Heloise preferred to be considered Abelard's mistress rather than his wife. In the Middle Ages, to be a mistress was a far nobler calling.While the historical time-line provides an excellent context in which to base our thoughts, it is the next section that I found the most interesting, a chapter entitled, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Ideas about Love. Because I found the last 200 pages of the book significantly less interesting and thought provoking, I will mostly be centering my comments on these first two chapters.There are two key themes that Ackerman writes on that I find particularly intriguing: the vulnerability one experiences in love and one's perception of time in love. I found resonance with many of her insights on these two topics, starting in her introduction, where she writes: "As a society, we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it...After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?" Moreover, love makes us transparent. After creating so many defenses in order to remain cool and veiled, it is often humiliating to find oneself in a situation where such defenses are rendered useless- a humiliation which is both joyful and terrifying. Ackerman writes that this is why Casanova was so successful as a lover: because he knew how to express pain and love in such a delicate way, only half revealing his own faults, and because he understood human fragility. With that knowledge, he constructed personas based on vulnerability to attract women. She wrote, "his secret weapon was the language of scars, which drove him to do, say, become anything, in order to love and be loved. It was all illusion, shadow animals against a wall."Because love is such a thrilling and ultimately emotionally unstable experience, we often seek excuses for ourselves. Particularly in early literature, lovers are struck by Cupid's arrow ("because at times love feels like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence."), victims of love-spells, and unintentionally drink love potion. Excusing the lovers of responsibility for their actions, they are free to act and feel passionately and wildly. Ackerman elaborates this point by using the story of Tristan and Iseult, specifically relying on Denis de Rougemont's commentary. De Rougemont argues further that intense passion requires obstruction. He writes that the lovers are:seeking peril for its own sake. But so long as the peril comes from without, Tristan's prowess in overcoming it is an affirmation of life. Magic comes in because the passion which has to be depicted has a fascinating violence not to be accepted without qualms... The church proscribes it as sinful, and common sense looks upon it as a morbid excess. It is thus not open to admiration till it has been freed from every kind of visible connexion with human responsibility. That is why it was indispensable to bring in the love-potion, which acts willy-nilly, and -- better still -- is drunk by mistake.The love-potion is an alibi for passion. It enables each of the two unhappy lovers to say: "You see, I am not in the least to blame; you see, it's more than I can help." Yet thanks to this deceptive necessity, everything they do is directed towards the fatal fulfillment they are in love with, and they can approach this fulfillment with a kind of crafty determination and a cunning the more unerring for not being open to moral judgment.Free from responsibility, having fully accepted that they ground they tread upon is unstable, the lovers allow themselves to truly be overwhelmed by their love, to experience it in its full capacity. They are entirely absorbed with each other. Their love is the quest itself, a being and journey unto its own. Their previous methods of reckoning are rendered useless under the new law of their love; the world, instead, is measured against their love, their vision. Their moral code is one that fulfills the livelihood and honor of their love alone and where challenges serve only to reinforce their faith.Time often serves as one of love's great obstructions. Waiting, anticipating and remembering all conjure specific emotions in relation to love. It is during these periods where we feel anxious, worried, relieved, doubtful, or impatient for the next moment with which to spend with our beloved. Ackerman writes:The essence of waiting is wishing the future to be the present. For a slender moment or string of moments, time does a shadow dance, and the anticipated future is roped by the imagination and dragged into the present as if it really were the here and now. The here and now is made to last beyond its mortal limits. What can be controlled this instant, and only for this instant, is magically generalized into a sea of instants in the uncharted world of the future. The thrill of waiting comes from the pretended breaking of irrevocable boundaries. It is like being privy to life after death.And it is that instant with one's beloved that's interesting: that after all the anticipation, these moments are sometimes too tangible to touch, too fantastic to be real. I have found myself in similar circumstances wherein I doubt the reality of my current moment for its overwhelming bliss. Or I find myself thinking: I will remember this moment ten years from now and yearn for it- I can already feel the nostalgia. These moments of absence heighten the ones spent present with the beloved. Vacant moments lend themselves to imagination, daydreams and romanticizing both the love itself and the beloved. I previously noted the role that imagination played for Egyptians, but it seems true enough that it continues to dominate the way perceive reality. Imagining my lover as epic and god-like makes him or her so: my perception is the only reality to which I can defer and by responding to my lover in this way, I re-affirm his/her myth.While reading these passages, I wondered how technology has affected the way we perceive the beloved as absent. At any point in time, I have several ways of contacting anyone I chose in a variety of methods. I can call a cell phone, text, tweet, instant message, or I can check a blog, profile page, or a status update to gain access to someone's life. We are in an age where we are constantly available to one another. I don't have to walk ten miles to visit someone, I don't have to wait for weeks or months for a message to delivered, nor do I have to conform to rigid social mores in my interactions with anyone. It seems possible that because we have so much access to each other's lives, any absences are perceived as deliberate. To avoid someone, you must go out of your way to be unavailable. Waiting for someone is hardly even tolerated. Experiencing someone's absence is no longer a period wherein we drift into daydreams of a lover's heroism or valiance, but a time when we feel spurned. Have our imaginations suffered?Ackerman goes on describe Proust's relationship with love and time. Drawing from passages from A la recherche du temps perdu, she writes:Every face reminds him of hers. Every object is a trip wire to an explosively painful memory. She is perpetually present in her absence. And that really is Proust's point about love, that it doesn't exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that's been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile, the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty.A friend and I were once discussing the role of imagination in brilliance, and he said, "a person can be measured by the vastness of their mind and fantasy." I believe this to be true not only of brilliant minds, but of brilliant lovers. Brilliant lovers imagine each other, fantasize about each other and live our their vision in the phenomenal world. The act of loving is an act of creation and a process of discovery. I have yet to meet a single person that isn't tragically flawed, fragile and ultimately human, even if these traits are tucked away under a carefully crafted cynicism. To love someone is to find beauty in another's tragedy, to find hope in their scars, to find tenderness in their vulnerability as well as finding joy in their utter grace and brilliance.These are truly touching and insightful themes that Ackerman has touched upon in her book. While I maintain that the last 200 pages are significantly less thoughtful and provoking, the first 130 leave me unable to call this book simply paltry or mediocre, but inspiring and up-lifting.
This is the 4th or 5th book I haw read by Ms. Ackerman and I can't speak highly enough of her ability to invoke all of the senses in her reader. Her writing is so smooth and intelligent. I have to admit this topic (love) isn't one I would normally read about. I tend to enjoy non-fiction, scientific writing (which she has a few books in this realm). However, there is an underlying sensuality in all of her writing. So I figured if anyone could write about "love" and keep me from feeling like I was reading a $2.00, Fabio on the from cover, erotic novel, it would be her. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It gives a great linear history about love and the way it has changed in social context. She also delves just a bit into the neurophysiology of love (which is my area of interest). I would highly recommend this to anyone, as it has the ability to appeal to a wife range of readers.
What do You think about A Natural History Of Love (1995)?
I felt as if Ackerman's prose was too florid and flowery, which made reading the book somewhat of a slogfest. I enjoyed seeing the historical aspects of love in the first part of the book, but even then, she would take her asides and ramble about tangential topics until one lost track of the original thread. Another issue I had (which is somewhat to be understood given when this book was written) was how little it covered LGBTQ and other spectrums of sex. For Ackerman, love and sex go hand-in-hand and there is a very deep, biological connection between the two. However, the way she writes paints this topic in broad strokes and covers love in a decidedly hetero-normative way. That, alongside her clear tilt towards the mystical and the Freudian psychoanalytical, makes this book anything but natural.
—David Lam
While there are a few very interesting facts regarding love, sex, and history, Ackerman's metaphors border on the ridiculously cheesy. Several times in the course of reading, I found myself rolling my eyes and yelling, "oh my gawdddd!!!! are you (expletive deleted) serious?!" I would post a few examples if I were in the mood to wince and cringe, but I just ate. *ALSO, I am thoroughly perplexed by the use of such antiquated terms as "discos" (as a plural noun) in a contemporary context. In a book published in 1995. Yes, the discos on this street are the grooviest. Lets blow this popsicle stand.?
—LoLo
I picked up this book from my shelf-- apparently I have already read it... but I have no memory of it! From rereading the first couple of chapters, though, I'm not sure I'd give it as many as 3 stars. She seems to proceed without first defining what she means by "love." Is it a feeling? Is it hormones? An emotional state? Is it something you DO? A close reader (or someone who has read a whole lot about "love") will notice that she uncritically bounces around between different conceptions of love, so her narrative of any particular concept is broken as she continues through more recent time periods. Maybe I'll keep reading... maybe I won't.
—Lesley
